Congratulations! You’ve been elected.

You said in your campaign that this is America’s last chance. Many of your supporters agree with you. It’s important to understand that you can’t screw this up. If you do, conservatism and populism will take the blame and the establishment will leverage your failure to replace you in four years, if not successfully neuter you as early as the midterm elections.

The media is going to continue to malign you. Those that were misled by the media won’t be easily swayed. They will come out in droves in the next election. You must go out of your way to include and sway them, all while not selling out on your promises to your base. This is achievable and might be as simple as directly, openly, and clearly addressing the accusations hurled at you - especially on the media’s repeated claims of racism, xenophobia, and bigotry.

Your Cabinet

Your cabinet selection is an opportunity for failure before you even take office.

You were elected by people tired of the oligarchy, the life-long bureaucrats and politicians, and the cronyism. If you begin filling your cabinet with these people, you simultaneously lose your base and fuel your critics. You need to choose real and intelligent people who are not politicians.

You need to embrace diversity, but not that of gender, skin color, sexual orientation or other meaningless group identity. You need to embrace diversity of thought. Your cabinet should be a meritocracy; the best suited people, regardless of who they are.

Ben Carson is the perfect example of this concept in action: He is intelligent, personable, relatable, and he’s never worked in government. Nobody gives a damn about his melanin.

Two specific suggestions for diversity of thought that will necessarily be inclusive:

Bernie Sanders. His supporters were disenfranchised when the primary was stolen from him. You and he don’t agree on everything, or perhaps even much, but you do have some key issues in common. Give him a voice and you give a voice to millions.

Ron Paul. The Sanders of the 2012 election, also with disenfranchised supporters. He is a calm and reasoned adviser with a significant education in free market economics. You have much in common and his pro-liberty movement represents millions more.

Forgive

It’s time to forgive the whistle-blowers that exposed government corruption and Constitutional violations. Not only are they deserving of a pardon, but this sets an expectation of transparency for your presidency. Begin with Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning, and Julian Assange.

Prosecute

You were elected by people who are tired of the cronyism and a ruling class that is above the law. You’ve promised to investigate Hillary Clinton if elected and you must follow through on this. Others sit in jail for lesser national security violations than she is accused of.

This can’t be about or limited to Hillary. This isn’t about revenge. Seek out and prosecute bureaucrats and elected officials who stole, took bribes, engaged in conflicts of interest, or generally leveraged government for their own gain. Set a high bar for your presidency. You must do this to restore faith in government.

Well-connected rich people and politicians should not be above the law and you must demonstrate this.

Taxes

Your proposals on this topic so far are an admirable start. You must follow through at all costs.

Your opponents say this will at to the debt. It will, if spending is left unaddressed. However, the alternative is to continue to burden the average American with Congress’ debt on a daily basis. Unburden Americans and American businesses first. Let households begin to thrive. See offshore funds return and bring jobs with them. Watch new businesses start and old businesses grow.

People with jobs rarely riot.

Welfare

Immediately and without exception, end all forms of corporate welfare. From oil to solar, big agra to big pharma, no companies should be funded by taking money away from America’s poor and middle class and giving to the rich. There is no moral or ethical defense of this.

Immediately and without exception, end all forms of foreign aid. Foreign aid is once again taking from middle and lower class Americans and giving to the rich in foreign countries. Much of this ends up being in the form of armament that ends up as thinly-disguised corporate welfare to the defense industry. Americans should be encouraged to give personally and privately to foreign aid organizations.

Begin systematically and carefully reducing personal welfare. While there is some moral argument for supporting these programs, they are, like all government, grossly inefficient, corrupt, and encourage a perpetual underclass in America. Welfare programs must be overhauled to be more efficient, oriented towards eliminating long term dependencies, and forcing the able-bodied back into the work force. It must be remembered that these programs still take from lower and middle class Americans, and with a high overhead of bureaucratic waste, redistributed to lower and middle class Americans.

Student Loans

Student loans make debt slaves out of the poorest age group in our society. This must be addressed, but cannot be addressed by simply spreading the burden among the same lower and middle class Americans.

Instead, remove the government entirely from the student loan business while simultaneously simplifying the inclusion of student loan debt in bankruptcy proceedings. This will cut back on people attending college and obtaining worthless degrees. People pursuing a useful degree could obtain a traditional loan, and a loan institution would be encouraged to do proper due diligence on the recipient because there’s a chance they wouldn’t see the loan repaid.

College tuition costs will fall because students can’t blindly get government-backed loans for outrageously priced educations in worthless fields of study. Colleges would be forced back to more reasonable pricing models. College attendance may fall somewhat, but not everyone needs a degree: simply look at how many with college degrees end up working jobs that don’t require them. That bachelor’s degree in underwater basket weaving hanging in the wall isn’t much consolation eyeballing $200k of student debt while flipping burgers.

End The Fed

You rightfully criticized the Federal Reserve as a candidate. You’ll have the power to reshape it, but the solution is to eliminate it. We’ve no need of a private banking cartel that sets interest rates and prints money in order to guarantee inflation. Inflation allows the silent theft of wealth from the lower and middle class, and benefits the rich and powerful as the first recipients of new money.

In a free market, there would be no central bank.

Short of eliminating it outright, you can start by passing a real audit of the Federal Reserve over the protestations of the cronies that benefit from the Fed’s actions. The Treasury should also cancel the $2 trillion in debt the United States owes the Federal Reserve, which would eliminate $100 billion in interest payments from the Treasury.

Eliminate the Federal Reserve buying treasuries through dealers at auction. In an amazing display of cronyism, and with no effort or value added, institutions like Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan Chase, and Citigroup siphon billions from these transactions.

Warfare

It’s time to draw down our involvement in global warfare and curtail military spending in order to contain the debt. This requires understanding the concept of blowback and what created ISIS in the first place. We’re involved in a perpetual cycle of warfare that greatly benefits the defense industry, spendthrift middle-eastern dictatorships, and related cronies.

Russia presents an opportunity, not a problem. We should be working with Russia, not against. We need to leave the middle east to the middle east, and stop entangling ourselves in thousand-year old conflicts that we don’t understand. We don’t have the money to keep funding and arming “rebels” that are simultaneously friend and foe.

We should leave both NATO as an antagonistic anachronism and the United Nations as interfering with our sovereignty. We should at a minimum stop funding either one at a level higher than any other country. Our economic competitors shouldn’t benefit by taxing our economy to provide a defense for them - especially from a non-existent threat.

We need to drastically cut our military spending, but this doesn’t necessarily have to be done by cutting troop levels or eliminating investment in technology. Stop patrolling the world and close our foreign bases and let our supposed allies pay to defend themselves.

Immigration

It’s not the immigrants, it’s the socialism. Most immigrants are hard-working decent people, but many are drawn here for the benefits. We can’t afford to have both, so perhaps the people need a choice: Social welfare programs or open borders. Make a reasoned argument and you may alleviate criticism while not alienating your base.

Consider changing the tax code to something consumption based such as the FairTax in order to ensure that everyone is contributing to the system they benefit from.

You can entirely eliminate one point of contention about immigration: enforce a mandatory voter ID law at the Federal level that requires proof of citizenship and proof of precinct residency. When it’s harder to get a fishing license than it is to register to vote, we have a problem. It is laughable to think that any particular group-identity doesn’t utilize some form of ID in this day and age, and is in fact “racist” to claim that any minority group-identity isn’t smart enough to wield an ID in order to vote.

Deregulation

Repeal the grossly-misnamed Affordable Care Act in its entirety, good and bad. You’re on the right track with pushing regulation to the states. Americans are different and will never agree to a ‘one size fits all’ model at the Federal level. Pushing regulations to the states allows people to vote with their feet. Apply this concept across the board, and explain this to critics while encouraging states to take over regulatory roles as they see fit.

Evaluate and abolish unnecessary regulatory agencies, such as the Department of Education which is redundant and interferes with state level agencies.

Aggressively rescind Executive Orders from past Presidents of both parties.

Supreme Court

Do not appoint neocons with a social agenda any more than you would appoint “living document” progressives. Look for strict Constitutionalists and libertarians that would embrace the concept of individual liberty and enforce Constitutional constraints on government while never infringing on the rights of the individual or the States.

Some litmus tests would be: gun control, gay marriage, and the drug war.

Spying

Disband the NSA domestic spying apparatus completely. It is unconstitutional and unacceptable. We won two world wars and defeated global communism without the NSA knowing what was on anyone’s credit card statements or phone records. Consider eliminating or consolidating the NSA into another agency.

Cronyism

Big companies enjoy leveraging government to their benefit. It’s time to end that practice as well as wield government against them.

Leverage the Sherman Anti-Trust Act to attack “Too Big To Fail” banks, Big Media, Big Pharma, Big Agra, and any other cartels that succeed largely due to lobbying influence and government cronyism.

Use the Sherman Act to split up Alphabet Inc (Google), which is far closer to a monopoly in multiple areas than Microsoft ever was. Google abuses its monopoly to shape public opinion, and destroys small businesses with a keystroke when “adjusting” their search rankings.

Listen

Find some other ordinary Americans to advise you. Start up a citizen advisory board made up of real people: engineers, stay at home dads, school teachers, plumbers, hair dressers.